Branded under the Allstar Premier Programme, the new product is said to offer savings of as much as £20k per year for a 100-vehicle fleet and is available at over 1,700 fuel outlets – over one in five of the total Allstar network of 8,000-plus sites – across the UK.
Although Allstar Premier Programme customers will need to carry two fuelcards – the usual Allstar one plus the Allstar Discount Diesel card for use in the discount diesel network – customers will receive just one invoice and one data report.
The programme has been launched following global fuel card provider FleetCor’s acquisition of the Allstar fuelcard in 2011, with the discount being levied at the 1,700 sites run by Allstar sister business Keyfuels – which is set to see a further 200 outlets added in the coming year.
In addition, Allstar is launching new support products identifying the discount fuel outlets including a new mobile app, online fuel finder and satnav download files.
Peter Bridgen, managing director of Keyfuels, said: ‘This is a brand-new product for us and we think it’s going to be a game changer. The idea is to bring convenience, control and now savings to our customers and prospects. So we carry the convenience of the Allstar network with nearly 8,000 sites, the control of a fuel card and being able to nominate products that you want to purchase, but also savings now within the 1,700 sites that Keyfuels have together with Allstar on diesel purchases.
‘We can save our customers up to about 4p per litre on diesel – significant savings.’
Included within the saving is the waived £1.50 Allstar transaction fee that was introduced controversially last year and is not levied on discount diesel purchases. There are also no set-up fees for the new card.
Commenting on the transaction fee and the problems with its introduction last year, Bridgen said that it’s because of this fee that the company can come up with new developments such as the Allstar Premier Programme.
He explained: ‘I think the vast majority of our customers understand why we introduced fees. And you know it shows with the amount of customers that are staying put with us. For us to now be able to deliver our Allstar Premier Programme to help our customers save on costs, that’s the important thing and that’s what we want to do going forwards.’
Bridgen also commented on the technical issues that some fleets suffered last year following Allstar’s implementation of its new GFN global fleet platform from parent firm FleetCor, saying: ‘We experienced some issues with this in the early days but that’s now all bottomed out and running really, really nicely. And in fact without GFN in place we probably couldn’t have delivered this product. This is the kind of thing that being part of FleetCor and having these shared services helps us to do.’
Bridgen also explained the diesel-only concept of the new product: ‘The last figures we looked at showed that something like 92% of our fleet customers using the Allstar card operate diesel. And so petrol is very, very small in comparison. The other thing is that the Keyfuels transaction works on the Keyfuels commercial bunkering concept, which is on-the-road bunkering where we put stock or fuel in sites and you can’t do that with petrol, it’s not a bunkered product and it doesn’t allow us to do that. But frankly we don’t see that as an issue because the majority of cars these days are diesel as opposed to petrol.’
He added: ‘We mustn’t forget the other benefits that the standard Allstar product delivers. You still have the ability to look for the lowest-cost fuel in the network and our Allstar business consultants will help our customers find ways of saving money, both with Allstar Premier Programme but with Allstar products anyway.’
Last year also saw the firm launch its supermarket fuel card that can be accepted at all four main supermarket brands and offers a discount compared to the national average price.
Summarising the benefits of the new product, Bridgen said: ‘With the support of our products like the online fuel finder, the satnav download files and the mobile app – as well as our Business Mileage Monitor with splits business mileage out from private in HMRC ready materials – we have a complete set of set of products and services that we are offering fleets and we will continue to enhance this.’
